This invention relates generally to printed materials and more particularly to billing statements and negotiable instruments.
One of the most ubiquitous aspects of modern life is the bill or statement from the sundry institutions and companies which supply everything from water to electricity, from clothing to school tuition. The modern world would could not function without this short-term credit arrangement.
The well known procedures associated with the use of statements is that a statement is sent out to the user/consumer who then utilizes the information on the statement to complete a negotiable instrument such as a check. This creation of the negotiable instrument calls for the user to complete portions of the check which define the identification of the payee, the amount to be paid, the date of the instrument, and authorizing signature.
In many situations, the service provider also desires that an identifier number also be supplied on the negotiable instrument so that the check can be matched to a specific customer. Sometimes this identifier is a long complex arrangement of letters and numbers which requires great concentration on the part of the user in completing.
Because of the large number of checks which are completed by each household and business bi-monthly, the consumer/user becomes increasingly fatigued and irritable which causes their handwriting to degrade to a point where it is almost impossible to read or discern what is being written.
Even further, for many elderly check writers, they easily become confused and often enter conflicting information on the check. This usually occurs where the amount is to be written as a numeral and where the amount is to be written in alphabetical terms. This ambiguity results in a check being returned to the user which furthers the accounting problems.
At other times, the formal name for the payee is shortened or mis-written which also results in the check being returned without crediting of the account. This often happens when the name of the payee is extremely long or where the company is commonly known by a nick-name (i.e. Mountain Bell Telephone Company, aka "Ma Bell").
If completing of checks poses a problem for the consumer, the problem of processing the millions of checks daily by the banks and major suppliers would seem next to impossible. The supplier is faced with the problem of properly crediting the various accounts; the bank must debit the proper account and assure that the correct credit is given to the supplier.
Even in the best of situations, the reading of handwriting requires the use of human operators at the banks to enter the amounts on the checks. In some situations, the computers have been designed to automatically read the account number for the check which is combined with the human entered amount value.
Because of this approach, which is forced on the banks by the basic nature of the check, errors occur and the cost of processing the checks so that proper credit and debit are made, increases.
Typically this process falls to a mind-numbing menial task which has not much changed since the middle ages; manually read the check and entering the value in the proper column. Automating this process has proven extremely difficult and continues to a large extent to evade the ability of computer programmers.
Because of the processing problems, numerous attempts have been made to facilitate the process and to remove the chances of errors. Examples of these attempts include: U.S. Pat. No. 3,455,576, entitled "Means for Preventing Unauthorized Cashing of Checks" issued to Hammerling on Jul. 15, 1969; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,022,683, entitled "Check Insert and Envelope" issued to Barbour on Jun. 11, 1991. Hammerling utilizes colored labels for placement on the back of the checks so that a counterfeiting endorsement of the check is more difficult; Barbour creates a card support for the check so that it can be machine managed more efficiently.
In neither of these situations though is the basic problem addressed and in both of these situations there still is required the human intervention in the processing of the checks which can result in a great deal of imposed error and cost.
It is clear from the foregoing that an efficient and cost effective method of handling checks is not available and is needed.